by Caron Todd
“There’s one for every three or four kids. Pam says it’ll be a valuable exercise in cooperation.”
“That’s generous of you.”
“Eleanor can only eat so much pie.” There was a glimmer of amusement on his face.
Encouraged, Liz went to the back step, where pumpkins waited to be transferred to the truck. She picked up a small one, and brushed dry dirt from one side, where it was flattened and wrinkled from sitting on the ground. Just looking at it she could see potential features in a squashed face, scary enough for kids Jennifer’s age. “I wanted to talk to you, Jack.”
He leaned against the step, waiting. In the bath last night, she’d planned a short, rational speech, but now she found she didn’t want to give it. She just wanted to stay with him, to talk all afternoon. “Did you and your friend ever get hold of each other?”
“We’ve left messages.”
“It was a long way to come on the chance of seeing you. He must be a good friend.”
“We go back a long way.”
“Back to the days of the unwashed neck?”
“Almost. Is that what you came to talk about?”
She took the pumpkin to the truck and brushed off her hands. “I came to apologize.”
“There’s no need, Liz. We got carried away. You changed your mind.”
She wanted him to know it was more than that. “We weren’t carried away. Getting as close as we did wasn’t just an impulse. It doesn’t make sense for us to get involved, though. That’s what I’m sorry for. It was careless to start something I couldn’t continue.”
“Because you’re leaving any day now.”
“That’s right.” She tried to smile. “It’s one of those might-have-been situations. Kind of romantic, really. Doesn’t it make you wonder how often people miss an opportunity for something wonderful to happen? You’re walking along a busy sidewalk, you catch someone’s eye and you both pause, then turn away and go on.”
“And that’s romantic?”
Liz nodded.
More emphatically, Jack said, “Squandered chances are romantic.”
“Sure. Lost love and all that. It’s a popular theme.” She wished she hadn’t used the word “love.”
For a moment she thought he was going to come right over and grab hold of her, but he stayed where he was. “Seeing someone you think you could care about and making room for that person in your life no matter how unlikely it is to turn out well…that’s romantic, Liz. A hell of a lot more romantic than a few sad tears as you walk by. People take chances like that every day.”
It was true. They did. She and Andy had. “In a way, I’m not free to start a relationship—” She broke off, annoyed with the awkward phrase.
Jack looked as if he’d finally got the point and couldn’t believe it had taken him so long. “You’re already involved with someone.”
Inaccurate, but true. As soon as she began to nod, he turned away, loading up with pumpkins again. The action was as expressive as a closing door. She was glad he’d ended the conversation, because she couldn’t look at those cool silver eyes any longer.
LIZ HURRIED THROUGH JACK’S woods. When it was time to turn toward her grandmother’s house she headed north instead, going deeper into the trees. She had to force herself to go that way. More than anything, she wanted the comfort of the kitchen.
The weather had changed in the past hour. Before lunch, there’d been some warmth in the sun. Not now. Low clouds and an icy northwest breeze had moved in. Ever since she’d arrived people had been saying it felt or smelled like snow. Today, she believed them.
The ground rose suddenly. Liz hesitated. Maybe this was a bad idea. Morbid.
Maybe she shouldn’t think, just walk.
She went on, crossing from her grandmother’s property onto Crown land. Gradually the loamy soil became sandy, and the woods thinned, then stopped. Brittle shrubs and patches of brown grass grew where road crews had dug deep into the ground long ago, leaving gravel mounds and a year-round pond. Liz climbed, dislodging stones and grit. When she reached the top of the incline, she forced herself to look at the ice-cold water below. Her eyes closed. Andy.
She could feel him. She’d been so aware of him lately, around the house and in the yard and now here. The only place he didn’t seem to linger was in the new school, in spite of the picture in the library, and even there she couldn’t escape thoughts of him.
Escape. That was the wrong word. She was glad to think of him. He deserved to be in her thoughts. Where else could he be?
She couldn’t see his face without seeing his smile. He was always smiling. His eyes were always full of fun. Even for the math final that June, the last barrier to freedom. Even when her parents opposed the idea of art school in Vancouver. The world was a wonderful place in his book. Everything was manageable.
“Liz?”
She turned toward the quiet voice and saw Jack standing on one of the lower mounds. The breeze had tousled his hair and reddened his nose.
“Careful, there,” he said. “Watch your step.”
“What are you doing here, Jack?”
“I followed you. To apologize for being holier-than-thou.”
“Everything you said was true.”
“Come down from there, Liz. It wouldn’t be good if you fell from that height.”
Liz gave a small, grimacing laugh. No, it wouldn’t be good. That was certain; it had been proved. She began to sidestep down the hill. Before she had gone halfway, Jack met her and took her hand.
“This would be a great place to toboggan. I suppose you did that when you were a kid?”
She nodded. “And we swam in the summer.”
“Sounds like fun. So why do you look upset?”
He didn’t seem to know. Considered too much of an outsider to hear that particular story, maybe. She swallowed, trying to get rid of the tightness in her throat. “Someone died here. Years ago.”
His face softened. “I’m sorry, Liz.” He took a look around. “Are we closer to my place, or your grandmother’s? Your grandmother’s, I think. Let’s go and get warmed up, then you can tell me what happened.”
Liz didn’t budge. “We were having a party, an end-of-summer party.” Her voice had gone hoarse, as if the cold air had frozen it. “This was a favorite hangout for a lot of people. Not for us, not for Susannah and me, not for Andy. Wayne and his group always got plastered. You know how things get when that happens. It’s not fun anymore. But this was the last party. Most of us were going away to school, or to find work. We didn’t know when we’d all see each other again.”
“I know the kind of party.”
Now that she’d got going, she couldn’t stop. “We hauled in food and beer. Drinking was the point of the night for some people. Andy seemed to want to keep up. I don’t know why. He never paid attention to those guys. ‘Have another one,’ Wayne kept saying. Andy took it as a challenge.”
“Boys do that sometimes. Proving themselves.”
“Then Wayne dared Andy to dive from the highest peak. Andy started to climb, just like there was nothing to think about. Until he got to the top. He stood up there, looking down, and he didn’t move.” The muscles around Liz’s mouth twitched. Her eyes burned. She didn’t want to cry. If she started, she wouldn’t stop. “Wayne said, ‘He’s afraid to jump.’ Sue said she didn’t see the others jumping. She said, ‘Ignore them.’ That would have been best.”
“But he didn’t ignore them.”
“No.” She felt Jack rubbing her hands. He unzipped his jacket and tucked them inside, against his sweater. “It turned out he couldn’t have done it, not even if he’d been the best athlete in the school. And he wasn’t the best athlete in the school. He wasn’t an athlete at all.”
“No one could have made the jump?”
“The deepest water was yards away from the line of the dive. Even there, it wasn’t deep enough. The point was, Wayne didn’t goad anybody else into diving. He chose Andy. The outsider. And
everyone said, ‘Too bad. Boys will be boys.’ People called it an accident. It wasn’t. Not really.”
“I’m sorry, Liz.”
“Pathetic little story, huh? It’s not all that uncommon, inebriated boys diving into shallow water. They just prove themselves to death.”
Jack’s hand was warm against her cheek. “Let’s get you home. You’re frozen.”
“I’m always cold. This place is still in the Ice Age. I should do a book about it, about a little corner of the prairies with glaciers and mammoths—” She could hardly squeeze the words past the tightness in her throat. Her voice dropped, and she said, mostly to herself, “I suppose I already did that with my dinosaur book. Lost worlds are fascinating, though. Children love lost worlds.”
THEY HAD TUCKED LIZ INTO BED under the thickest feather quilt Jack had ever seen, with a hot water bottle at her feet and another one, wrapped in a pillowcase, for her to hug to her stomach. In the kitchen, Jack put a cup of tea beside Eleanor. She was too pale for his liking. “I think I should call the doctor for both of you.”
“We’ll be fine, don’t you worry. I suppose this was bound to happen.”
“But the accident was years ago. Looking at Liz, you’d think it was today.”
“She ran off right afterward. She went to the funeral with Andrew’s parents, without even telling us when or where it was, and then she just left. Every few weeks she called her parents, or her grandfather and me, to say she was fine. That was all. She was fine, goodbye. It was a couple of years before she wanted to see any of us. She wouldn’t come back here, though. We went to visit her. You’d hardly know anything had happened, except she wouldn’t let anyone talk about Andrew.”
Jack didn’t know what to say, so he just poured more tea.
“We didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Of course not.”
Eleanor’s hand trembled when she sipped her tea. “No one was unkind to him, no one in the family at least. Elizabeth told me he had some trouble fitting in at school. It’s difficult to move to a small place with a long history. Well, you know that. His family seemed to expect a perfect window box town, a storybook town. Not one full of stubborn people whose forebearers were tough enough to survive here when there was nothing but bush for miles around. People take pride in that. Maybe they show off a little. But Elizabeth blamed everyone for Andrew’s death.”
“An indictment against the whole community?”
“Yes! That’s it exactly. So, off she went to Vancouver. She became an art student, and left the grieving wife here.” Eleanor took a second look at Jack’s face. “Don’t be too concerned. I’m afraid the whole situation was waiting for her. She’ll have a difficult time for a while, but she’ll be better off in the long run. Things have to be faced. She hasn’t ever liked to believe that. How she used to scowl at me—”
“Liz was married?”
“You didn’t know? I was sure you did. Strange that none of us told you.”
Maybe not so strange. People weren’t usually chatty about their flaws and failures. Jack didn’t know what he thought about Wayne and the gravel pit and the adults who’d done nothing. Pathetic, as Liz said. Awful. A waste. He’d never believed Three Creeks was a storybook town, so he shouldn’t be surprised by the proof. The important thing now was to get some color back in Eleanor’s cheeks. Of everyone involved she had the least reason to feel bad. It made him angry to see her hand tremble.
FROM HER BEDROOM WINDOW Liz watched Jack stride across the backyard, his feet lost in shadow. She wouldn’t want to walk through the woods at night. There was only a half moon. That wasn’t much light to go by.
At least he wouldn’t be too cold. There wasn’t any wind now, not even a breeze. She could tell by the trees in the yard. Their branches were absolutely still, silvery against the sky. The prairie sky that her grandmother didn’t want to leave. There were no mountain ranges to interrupt it, no city lights to make it dim. It was clear and black and endless, crowded with sharp, bright stars.
Some people liked to say stars were souls out of harm’s way, twinkling down on the living. Hadn’t the ancient Egyptians believed that? Your soul was weighed and if it was light enough, up it went. Of course, stars weren’t souls. They were big balls of burning gasses. Sometimes she wished she didn’t know anything.
Her eyes closed. This was an old pain. Why was it back? New and fresh.
She had stared at the water that night fifteen years ago, as if her mind could unmake that last moment, that throw-your-heart-and-follow-it leap, and when she saw Andy on the shore it had kept fumbling through the facts, looking for the mistake, the thing it could put in place so he would open his eyes and see her again. She didn’t understand how he could disappear like that. How could he be thinking and breathing and feeling at the top of the hill, and then not, a few seconds later, at the bottom? What vapor or essence or electrical impulse had made him Andy, and where had it gone so easily, so fast? Sometimes, even now, she thought she should be able to reach out her hand and find him, that if only she knew how, she could pick him up the way you picked up a child who fell off a swing. Sometimes the thought crept up on her that only geography was between them, only miles of mountains and miles of prairie, that somewhere in those miles Andy was waiting for her to find him.
She was cold, all goose bumps and shivering. She pulled the quilt from the bed and wrapped it around her, right up around her ears and nose, her hands tucked inside.
If only his family hadn’t moved to Three Creeks. He would be an artist in Vancouver now, and she would be a gym teacher—right here in town, maybe, having a tea break with Em and Pam every day. Or if only they hadn’t met. Or if they’d met, but not married. Married, but stayed home that night. One decision different.
CHAPTER NINE
ON HALLOWEEN MORNING heavy clouds reached down into the tops of the trees around Eleanor’s house. By noon a few snowflakes floated in the air. By the time school was out, the roads were a wet, sloppy mess. After the sun set they would be treacherous.
“No one will come around,” Liz said. “Not in this.”
She carried the third jack-o’-lantern out to the veranda. Eleanor always put one on each step, lighting the way to the door. Jack had brought the pumpkins yesterday, almost tiptoeing, almost whispering, as if he were in a sick room. Liz was sitting beside the stove wrapped in the afghan when he came, still cold a whole day after visiting the gravel pit. She felt numb all over, as if her entire body had been to the dentist. She’d watched Jack and Eleanor spread out newspapers, spoon out seeds and pulp and cut features in the shells, comforted by the remembered actions. When night finally came, she had crawled into bed without washing her face or brushing her teeth and slept deeply.
Today had been a better day. She and her grandmother had worked at a few quiet jobs, not even talking most of the time. She was doing her best to behave like her usual self. After all this time she wasn’t really a widow. She’d hardly been a wife. And she wasn’t the one who’d died young.
Using herself as an umbrella, Liz leaned over the three pumpkins, one by one, and lit the candles inside. In the middle of a blizzard, the flames looked very small. Wet snow soon put them out. She found flashlights to tuck inside instead, but half an hour later, snow fell so heavily the faint light couldn’t be seen from the kitchen window.
Eleanor sat at the table, where she could keep one eye out for children at the door. She looked small and sad. The past couple of days had been difficult for her. “The youngest have usually been and gone by now,” she said. “Preschoolers before dinner, grade ones just after dark. Such a disappointment for them.”
Liz picked up a box of playing cards. “How about a tournament while we wait?”
“I wouldn’t mind a game.” There was an ungrandmotherly glint in Eleanor’s eye. Liz was glad to see it. Maybe things would soon get back to normal between them. Eleanor had been concerned about Liz, but perplexed by her distress, too. She believed that when something was in f
ront of you, you faced it. End of story. Liz really thought she had faced what happened at the gravel pit. Take that, Three Creeks. I’m outta here. In her mind, she hadn’t run away, she had run to the life she’d planned with Andy.
They shuffled both decks, and laid their cards across the table. As soon as Liz’s last card was in place, Eleanor began moving hers, slapping down red and black cards in sequence and shunting aces to the top. Liz moved to put a Jack of Spades on a Queen, and a nine of Hearts on a ten, but quick and light, Eleanor’s hand got there first. Soon Liz was reduced to watching her grandmother play.
An hour later, Eleanor was still unbeaten. A few trick-or-treaters called while they played. The first time Liz went to the door Tom stood just inside the reach of the porch light, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched up to keep his neck warm, while two small wizards and a princess collected their candy. They were followed almost immediately by Pat, with her hair full of snow and Nell the Teddy Bear in her arms. Nell was terrified of her costume and wouldn’t even look at the basket of candy, so Pat took a red lollipop for her and went back into the storm, muttering about a hot bath and a glass of scotch. Last was Stephen, dressed as a hockey player, his oversize Oilers jersey fitting perfectly over his parka. He moved slowly in his knee and elbow pads, a bag for candy looped over a hockey stick. A car waited for him in the driveway, barely visible through falling snow.
“Did you have any trouble on the roads?” Liz asked.
“Nope,” Stephen said confidently, but he added, “The Mounties are turning people back on the highway. And we got stuck once, on the little creek road.” The hard squared fingers of his hockey glove were as awkward as a robot’s hand, so Liz scooped some treats into his bag. “Wow! Thanks.”
“Keep safe out there.”
“We won’t get anyone else,” Eleanor said, when he was gone. “Even in a mild year, there’s never anyone after eight.”
“Good. Then we won’t be interrupted.” One after another, Liz laid five cards down on the aces in the middle of the table. “You’d better look out. I’m going to get you this time, Grandma.”